Playtika's casual games portfolio grows revenue 16% as the company seeks M&A

Israel-based mobile gaming developer Playtika released on August 4 its financial results for its second quarter period: revenue up to $659.2 million compared to $650.5 million in the prior year period, a 1.3% increase; and net income of $90 million compared to a loss of $139.6 million. Adjusted EBITDA was $264.4 million compared to $283.2 million in the prior year period.

“Our business in the second quarter accelerated across several key areas,” said Robert Antokol, Chief Executive Officer of Playtika. “We enhanced player conversion, drove revenues to our proprietary platforms and ramped up new game development, allowing us to announce our upcoming new game’s global launch ahead of schedule.”

Wooga’s first-ever story-driven puzzle game will see a g lobal launch in Q4’21. Additional new casual global game launch are planned for 2022.

Another key point was reduction of costs of maintaining the company running: total cost of the expenses was $1 billion, down 13.2%. Sales and marketing costs saw a 14.1% increase, and research and development costs increased over 40%, but general and administrative costs were down by 58%.

Company remains “optimistic” about prospects for the remainder of 2021 and beyond, with an average daily player conversion increased to 2.9%, up from 2.7%; and casual portfolio growing revenue 16% year-over-year.

For the full year 2021 the company anticipates revenue of $2.60 billion and Adjusted EBITDA of $1.0 billion.

“We were pleased to achieve organic revenue growth against a challenging comparable in the prior year quarter,” said Craig Abrahams, President and Chief Financial Officer. “Our teams utilized our live-ops capabilities to develop and leverage our Boost technology platform across our game portfolio, allowing us to re-iterate guidance for both revenue and adjusted EBITDA for 2021.

Playtika remarks importance of over $1.7 billion of available liquidity to drive mergers and acquisition initiatives. Cash and cash equivalents totaled $1,179.7 million as of June 30th, 2021 with $600 million in additional borrowing capacity pursuant to Revolving Credit Facility.